My experience is that the in-game BBS works fine-ish for announcements but suck for discussions however most of the time people are not that interested in discussions so that's fine. I've seen atleast one game that created a subreddit for their game though it didn't look very used.
On RfK I argued that we should set up twitter accounts for our vampires and have IC twitter brawls. The players were worried it would make outsiders over-react.
If you ignore his previous visual incarnations for a moment and just go with 'A human form alien thats powered by the light of a yellow sun', wouldnt his most natural skin color be Blue(blue is what remains if you remove yellow from light) or atleast heavily tan/dark skinned?
Wow, there's a lot of people irrationally offended by the fact that White Wolf are not going to try to license the CoD Setting for novels/games etc and that they don't consider TTRPGs an income source.
As an example of the hate, I have a friend who says all of the right things, claims to be woke and progressive, but "just can't get into" She-Ra "because of the art."
Some things are just subjective. Art direction is the primary reason I haven't gotten around to watching She-Ra.
As for Revelations, I've watched the three first episodes so far and my judgement is it's ok. It's not bad but it's not something I'm ever likely to recommend someone either. That said the decision to kill off He-Man and Skeleton in the first episode and focus on the other characters is probably the only reason I kept watching, as someone with no nostalgic connection to the original He-Man has only ever come across as silly to me.
A Lord of the Rings series based on events from The Silmarillion.
A Wheel of Time production that's apparently already renewed for season 2 but has stopped twice due to Covid-19.
I... think House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones spinoff is also in the works although I don't know if it wasn't the one being cancelled? That whole franchise was poison-pilled by GoT's last season, damn.
My default position is to have zero faith in book to TV adaptions until I actually get to see them. The fact that Game of Thrones and Witcher were actually good was a welcome surprise in the ocean of incredibly dull fantasy TV adaptions.
There was hundreds of pages' worth of content about how the One Power worked for example can't be quite transferred over as-is without it being boring, but they could spread it out across multiple seasons in a simplified form.
One advantage Wheel of Time has when it comes to high budget visual adaptions is how Robert Jordan was really big on visual metaphors for how the power works. Rather then explaining it through exposition they could just show it.
The new season of Rick and Morty just isn't doing it for me. I am having a really hard time pinning down why; I think there's been a fairly steady decline in quality since the second season, but even though there were still some rough gems in the third and fourth seasons, I haven't even cracked a smile in the last few episodes. Maybe it's just run its course for me, I dunno.
I think the Writers of Rick and Morty ran out of their best ideas a couple of seasons ago and are now practically running on autopilot.
@Coin said:
Not actually on topic but something I consider to be a worthwhile PSA: Cold water makes burns worse, not better. In fact if you subject your burn injury to too much cold water you'll suffer frostbite injuries in addition to your burn.
I haven't played the video games, but I can imagine they probably work for the same reason the show works. You have a Gary-Stu protagonist who, aside from delivering on male fantasy aspects (strong, muscly, doesn't afraid, all women melt for him) has no real personality or motivations aside from sitting on the fence a lot. He travels from place to place killing monsters, which allows for a flexible narrative introducing all kinds of funner characters and scenarios along the way. I don't think he's interesting and I don't think he's meant to be. The pilot snagged me precisely because it presented a compelling choice through his neutrality without needing to alienate anyone who would feel strongly about either possibility.
Yes. That's exactly why the games work, especially in Witcher 3 where they went open world. They made excellent work at making you feel like a professional monster hunter that has no personal investment in most of the things you get pulled into while meeting lots of interesting characters and being a neutralish party in their stories. Geralt himself doesn't really have anything going on aside from his family of sorts.
They leaned into it by rather then just having you go places and kill monsters, you first haggle over how much you're supposed to get paid, then you track the monster, learn about the monster, get an opportunity to prepare poisons and potions for that specific monster etc which makes an interesting contrast against more heroic stories.
This kind of narrative is by and large sorely lacking in Western culture IMO — it represents a kind of communal heroism rather than that of a lone individual. It celebrates diversity, perhaps not in the modern sense of identity, but of skill and thought. That many people together, albeit each with their many flaws, can accomplish a task no one could accomplish alone, even when their involvement isn't immediately obvious. (Aragorn & Co. serve to distract Sauron in order to give Frodo, Sam and Gollum a better chance to get the ring to Mount Doom. The quest's glory isn't theirs directly, but they're nonetheless integral to its success behind the scenes.)
It's a bit of a shame and almost weird how as copied as all the other aspects of Tolkiens work are, almost all of them abandon the communal heroism in favor of more straight chosen one narratives.
@Sandor said in Play-by-post analog to MUSoapbox:
So, as it turns out, I have a life, and I can't really spend hours every day on a MU* anymore. It's actually the reason I can't tabletop, either.
Is there a place to the effect of MUDConnector or MU Soapbox that covers play-by-post games?
https://www.rpnation.com/ is dedicated mostly to play-by-post rp.
These days my youtube is mostly sciencetuber content.
Stand-up Maths is great at making weird mathematics interesting.
Veritasium is great at investigating all sorts of concepts.
Corridor Crew analyze and sometimes reproduce CGI and stunts in movies, often with special guests.
Viva La Dirt League just really great gaming themed comedy skits
SmarterEveryDay lots of good educational videos
Stuff Made Here what happens if you leave an engineer alone with an entire workshop
Technology Connections learn more about technology in your house you never thought about
ElectroBoom Everything you shouldn't do with electronics
Steve Mould Assorted science videos, usually with practical demonstrations
@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
ETA: I realise I'm dealing with generalisations here, so while many have expressed the sentiment that everything is a 'sometimes, some people, everywhere/everyone is different', my reason for raising some of these questions is that on MUDs, a lot of this stuff is practically unheard of (or even strictly forbidden). It's the same token by which not all Scotsmen wear kilts, but you're definitely a lot more likely to see them there than in England. So I ask, 'How widespread is kilt-wearing in Scotland? Will I be looked at funny there if I don't wear a kilt?'
There are people that play MUSH while locking their pages and leaving all OOC channels, that works pretty fine as long as you do mostly social RP but you want to get involved with things the more OOC communication tends to become necessary. That is, you'll probably be fine not wearing a kilt.
@ganymede said in Dabbling, Mastery, Dunning–Kruger etc:
You'll forgive me if I choke on the irony if this is a genuine statement.
What my opinion is and what people think my opinion is can often be wildly divergent because of my bad habit of focusing on very specific things and the specificity getting lost in translation. I need to learn to stop doing it because I practically never actually encounter anyone who cares about or thinks about it in the way I do.
That said, I concur. I try not to judge how easy or hard something is based on my own ease or difficulty. I've learned to listen to others about their thoughts on a topic. I do not think, for instance, that I will ever fully understand how to code, but I do enjoy reading the topics in this forum about it.
I think the mistake people do with coding specifically is that they think of 'coding' as if it's this one thing, like riding a bicycle or something along those lines.
Coding is more like cooking, baking or chemistry in that what you're trying to do is tell a computer system to do something by giving it instructions, however there's countless ways to give those instructions to achieve countless different things.
If you ever wrote down a recipe, you know how to 'code' in its most basic sense and if you want you can call yourself a coder just like someone making a muffin can call themselves a baker if they like.
However if you want to make something more complicated, it'll take proportionally more time and effort to figure out what ingredients you need, how to put them together into a coherent whole etc and with an enterprise project you might have 100+ bakers who all might have different ideas about the One True Way of baking.
So ultimately 'understanding code' is more of a spectrum of knowledge where ultimate mastery is impossible and you always have to continually learn new things.
The main thing I get the impression people with no understanding of coding get wrong is that they think of it as some kind of magic where code just makes things happen and they expect unrealistic results. Code is just a long list of instructions executed in order.
@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
@Thenomain said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
I would be okay with that second meta pose but a lot of people would bristle at it. It's entertaining and probably accurate. If you had posed how you thought he was a jerk but would never say so out loud, you are denying the other player retort to an insult. That is not okay.
Is it different if I use my character's silently-held disdain to explain the atmosphere of the scene? e.g.:
When @Thenomain walks up to Kestrel, she just glares. She thinks he's a jerk, but of course she'd never say that out loud. And so biting back her insult, she grits her teeth and says, "Good day... sir."
Some people like posing like that, some people don't. There's no real standard.
@ganymede said in Autism and The MU* Community:
These are excellent strategies, but I find them patronizing. I employ them with my daughter, but would not do so with an adult or online. This is because I try not to talk to people as if I consider them a child.
I also do not automatically go to “neuroatypical” when I converse with someone. That feels patronizing to me too. I am fairly sure I am neurotypical, and I recognize others are not, but I am not going to presume someone pressing me is neuroatypical. In my experience, such are actually pushy neurotypical assholes.
I don't think you should assume someone pressuring you in general is neuroatypical nor would I suggest these kind of strategies should be applied broadly. Except in so far it's good practice to assume good faith.
Rather that when you notice a very specific pattern of behavior, it's a sign something autism related is going on and you can cut it off. A year and a half ago we had someone get dogpiled on this forum where it was instantly obvious to me this was what was going on because while anyone can be an asshole the pattern where someone keeps trying to clarify themselves over and over I usually only see from people on the spectrum.
@Kestrel said in Cultural differences between MUDs and MUSHes:
Mainly I think the difference is that on a MUD, RP is a lot more dynamic; there is a lot of code in place to make it so. In a MUSH, as clued in by the term 'shared hallucination' (instead of dungeon), it's make-your-own-fun, and unless you make it so, RP is static. Everyone in a room is expected to involve everyone there, and you cannot really move your character around without ending the RP taking place. (Conversely in a MUD, if you leave the room, I can follow you.)
Follow is a command in most MUSHes, it's not that uncommon for RP to move around between rooms. Many MUSH also have places code that work just like you're used to.
@too-old-for-this said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
@boneghazi Just as a thought, if you can, you may want to see if his issues with writing and shoelace-tying are fully a focus thing. My youngest still won't get 'lace up' shoes because he has fine motor control issues as part of his suite of diagnoses. When he was younger he would patently refuse to write by hand, and even today his handwriting is considered 'childish'.
When I was in school I was assigned an extra 2 hours a week of handwriting class and given special tools to help with handwriting and it did absolutely nothing for me.
It also became routine for most of my time in school for the girls in my class to fix my shoelaces for me because I never managed to tie them properly.
Now I buy shoes without shoelaces and never write anything by hand if I can help it. If technology hadnt caught up and allowed homework to be done on computer and printed by the time I hit high school I have no idea how I would have managed. Writing a single page gave me cramp.
My impression so far of Arx is that the staff are very friendly and responsive and by all impressions are working really hard to make Arx into what they want it to be. I've had suggestions implemented minutes after I suggested them.
The game is complete enough that it can be played in a social sense, but the mechanics that are meant to power the political aspect are yet to be implemented fully(Domains, tasks, NPC minions etc). What I've seen of their mechanics so far is interesting and if they manage to implement things in accordance to their vision they might create something really great.
My main concern about Arx is that I'm getting the impression that the staff rather then having a firm idea of what they want and how to achieve it, are kind of winging their game mechanics as they go along.
My suggestion would be for @Apos and the others to take some time to write out exactly how they'd like all their systems to work and interact so that they can more cleanly work towards that goal.
If you have a clear answer to questions like How long should combat last? What kind of armor do we want players to use? How large of an advantage do we want expensive armor to grant? It's a lot easier to figure out how to code the fatigue and armor mechanics for instance.
The playerbase itself seems to skeev somewhat to Firan refugees at this early stage which can sometimes feel awkward when everyone is talking about a game I've never played or know much of anything about. They also seem to skeev somewhat to multi-paragraph posing which is something I have mixed feelings about.
@Wizz said:
Read: pervasive racism and sexism. If you really want to drag this down to semantics, fine, whatever, yes, he will encounter fleeting moments of "racism and sexism" by one of the literal definition of those terms outside of the context of this discussion.
Derp will face pervasive racism and sexism. Benevolent racism and sexism is still racism and sexism and has it's own issues. For instance it will most likely continue to remain hard for Derp to gain access to support groups as the social expectation is for him to be able to take care of himself
@Wizz said:
And yes, there will be a finite number of times in his life where he will experience real hostility or negative bias. There is still just no comparison to the kind of life typical to a person who doesn't check two arbitrary boxes.
Assuming Derp is telling the truth, then Derp is doing worse then the typical member of any western social group you can care to name. The typical, as in statistically median member of most social groups is doing just fine.
@Apos said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:
Though @groth has a very fair point that quite a bit is being developed as we go. I do have strong opinions about where we end up, in terms of having a vision, though I don't necessarily think it's a terrible thing to refine mechanics throughout- I worry about laying out something specific and sticking to my guns come hell or high water kind of invites the game developing in an aberrant path away from things I originally envisioned and thought would be fun, which are a lot more abstract.
Though yeah I agree, having a clearer end point rather than more vague general goals would be a lot more efficient.
I agree that it's not necessarily to stick to a design idea come hell or high water. Rather that when you're dealing with a moderately complex system, it's often a lot easier if you design from the goal to the fiddly bits rather then fiddle with things until you reach your goal.
By analogy, if you want to make a box for storing a litre of liquid, you can either keep changing the dimensions of each side until you find something that neatly holds your litre, or you can do a simple volume calculation to find out what lengths you need in one go. If you then decide that a two litre container would be much more convenient, you now also know how to get there quickly.
To talk about more specific things. I quite like how your vote and journal system works. By limiting your votes to 10 votes per week and journal xp to 7 xp per week, you effectively get a system very similar to the +beats system used by Requiem for Kingsmouth that most people that tried it quite enjoyed. The limit on the votes means that the main XP source isn't massive court scenes as can often be the case in +vote systems and journals provide means to flesh out your own personal stories and grant you more control over the rate you earn xp.
I also quite like the idea behind the Task system, which seems to me to be a way to encourage characters to take their organisations interests on-screen and convince other players/characters that they did a good job. However at the current stage it's very confusing and the selection of tasks is very limited. I think Tasks will benefit greatly from a web GUI, a step by step guide for how it works and possibly some tweaking of the syntax.
One long term concern I have is how you intend to ensure that the game is still approachable by new players in a year or four years from now, when a long term player might be sitting on many thousands of xp and more resources then they can feasibly spend. There's been many approaches tried to handle this with their own pros and cons like having a hard cap on XP spent (such as Haven) or giving catchup xp to new characters (like Fallcoast/Reach) or diminishing returns on spending XP (Like Requiem for Kingsmouth). Some might think that alpha is too early to think about such things, but I think you definitely want to have those things ironed out before you go 1.0 in order to avoid really vicious new vs old player arguments down the line.
Belatedly I noticed in your first post that you have noone on the team experienced with CSS. While I'm far from being a professional webdev, if you want some help with coding the web side of the game I'm happy to help.
That article doesn't say what you think it says. Racism when used academically refers to an institutionalised system of oppression, that's not what anyone refers to when they call someone a racist.
@Insomnia said in Harassment in VR, there's something we can likely learn from this.:
Twitch IS trying to curb it, at least. No nipples on a live person for anyone! Doesn't matter if it's legal for you to go topless down the street, if you have nipples, you can't show them on screen.
Which has been sending people to Youtube. Only Youtube has a vague no partial nudity rule. Also no profanity, or sexual innuendo as part of the ToS. So in theory people could complain if they are offended by it. And with this new Youtube Heroes thing it could get... internesting.
(Pixilated nipples are okay on Twitch though, so long as they aren't the focus of the game.)
American censorship policies in regards to human bodies has never impressed me. I'd rather the viewers themselves decide what they want to watch.
They matched me with Rey, I'm not going to complain.
